PMASA-2016-58

Announcement-ID: PMASA-2016-58

Date: 2016-11-25

Updated: 2016-12-06

Summary

Unsafe generation of blowfish secret

Description

When the user does not specify a blowfish_secret key for encrypting cookies, phpMyAdmin generates one at runtime. A vulnerability was reported where the way this value is created using a weak algorithm.

This could allow an attacker to determine the user's blowfish_secret and potentially decrypt their cookies.

Severity

We consider this vulnerability to be of moderate severity.

Mitigation factor

This vulnerability only affects cookie authentication and only when a user has not defined a $cfg['blowfish_secret'] in their config.inc.php

Affected Versions

All 4.6.x versions (prior to 4.6.5), 4.4.x versions (prior to 4.4.15.9), and 4.0.x versions (prior to 4.0.10.18) are affected